Is This Why The Police Held Back?

Never let a crisis go to waste, after all. Let’s face it, tighter internet regulation is something every government wants and an excuse like the Capital in flames doesn’t come along every day.
We could also point out (and many have) that the Police are very good at getting tough on drunks and students, but chicken out when it comes to actual criminals- they do it every day so when the criminal element is out en masse it is hardly surprising… however, rumours abound on the -shall we say- less reputable websites that the Met were ordered to hold back.
More on the civil disorder from me later, when I’ve organised my thoughts.

Tragedy

As the story of the tragic shooting in Seascale emerges the talking heads are predictably turning their attentions back to gun controls. This isn’t your average shooting you see, not a gangland killing between criminals, not even such a case where innocents have been caught in the crossfire, for this is a registered and licensed gun owner that has gone on the rampage leaving at least twelve people dead and as many injured, some critically.

The theme of the next few days is probably going to be one of wondering how we still allow people (even highly vetted ones) access to guns, how can we call ourselves civilised if we allow them and a total ban is the only way these tragedies can be avoided. There may even be some hastily-written legislation.
“Look at the Americans!” they’ll wail. “People go postal over there all the time!” You can’t disagree with that, can you?

Yes. The way to mitigate, if not prevent incidents like this is to increase the availability of firearms, not reduce it. The armed police apparently only got it together to chase the guy when he was already on his way to the woods to top himself. Regular police aren’t armed and crucially neither are the public, leaving the crazed Bird unmolested as he wandered around and killed a dozen people.

The anti-gun lobby will point to the States and say that gun availability there is a factor in the incidence in these crimes but it is also apparent that the worst atrocities happen in places where guns are not allowed like shopping malls and schools.

If we had more liberal gun laws in this country it is very possible that Bird would have been stopped by a member of the public long before he reached a dozen victims. I know I would feel safer knowing that decent, law-abiding folk were armed as a matter of course.

Scary Attitudes

I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve heard on the television since the results of the election saying things along the lines of “I think what we need is for the politicians to come together and stop arguing amongst themselves, that’s what the people want.”

Scary. Do these people understand what they’re saying? It started with the pundits -who of course DO understand- and it’s now spreading to the interviewed members of the public, this morning with a gentleman in an England t-shirt in a pub on Sky News.

This can’t-we-all-just-get-along attitude sounds all very nice and fluffy but what essentially it’s asking for is a one-party state (a proper one). Politicians from different parties aren’t supposed to get along and agree on everything, they’re supposed to tell us what they think and then we choose the ones we agree with.

I think perhaps a lot of the reason we got a hung parliament is that there isn’t enough choice: all the main players were offering pretty much the same thing, and so they all got (vagaries of the electoral system aside) pretty close shares of the vote.

I’m personally quite pleased with this result as it shows the electorate are starting to understand the limited choice they are offered. It doesn’t mean that the electorate think all the parties should have some sort of love-in, despite how the talking heads are trying to portray it. The only way it could be better IMO is if there were a few more parties with fifty-odd seats, so more of the public (myself included) get some representatives for our views in government. This may yet come- despite losing seats, the Lib-Dems still got a comparable percent of votes, and are still getting to play a major role in who forms the government. This can only be good for the prospects of smaller parties. It also keeps the ministers busy thrashing issues out and gives them less time to pump out statute after statute after statute.

Political systems in which all the politicians have been on the same side have been tried before of course, and it doesn’t generally work out very well for the other side: the governed.

As a wise man once said:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

The Slave Class

I’ve covered this before -in the post that has garnered my largest number of hits to date, and still generates a fair amount of traffic, even several months later- but it seems appropriate to go over it again in the light of certain announcements from the Conservative conference.

The transition of the Underclass to a fully-fledged Slave Class was announced, as the conservative leader pledged to force the long-term unemployed into training or community work or face losing their benefits.

Many people in the UK are caught in the benefits trap, and make no mistake; a trap it most definitely is. It’s become a cliche that one “would be better off on benefits” and like most cliches it has an element of truth. Once caught in that trap it becomes almost impossible to break free, as mummy has found out. Childcare costs, rents, the cost of travelling to work and gaps in (or lack of) a CV conspire to stop work paying and hard to find, even before the crash. Work is even harder to find now of course, and with every increase in the minimum wage (ostensibly there to improve the situation) it gets harder and harder.

So these souls are caught in a dependency on the State. Now the State intends to force these people to work. No bad thing you might think. There are obviously jobs in communities that need doing and we’re paying for them anyway, right?

Take a second to think it through though.

That could well be your job. Especially if you are a striking bin man, or a postman, or some other worker in the public sector. Why pay a decent above-minimum wage rate complete with pension when you can simply get a load of JSA-types from the job centre on £1 an hour?

They may end up in private-sector jobs too, on “work experience” schemes. Contract cleaners, bar staff, machine operators and caretakers: I’m talking to you. The implications of this move are far-reaching and affect far more people than those on benefits.

Rather than looking to the causes of unemployment these proposals (and remember these proposals have been repeated more-or-less by both the opposition and the incumbents) effectively recruit the entire underclass into the public sector and actually divert labour, opportunity and money away from the productive classes.

All it does is create a cheaper class of workers (with all the disadvantages of temporary work and none of the advantages) who will be in direct competition with those already working. Over time, more and more workers will be laid off as the minimum wage ensures it is cheaper to draft in cheaper labour from the government. Those laid-off workers will go on benefit, and thus increase westminster’s labour pool.

Going to a logical conclusion, every low- or un-skilled position could eventually be contracted via the state, greatly increasing the state’s intrusion in the economy.

Still keen?

It’s Coming

I saw it on the news yesterday, again different groups of extremists fighting in the streets. This time it was the English Defence League and those “anti” fascist people (again). It seems to be becoming a regular feature on the news, groups of ideologically opposed (allegedly: really they are just different factions of the same ideology) bully-boys fighting it out in the streets; mainly in the north at the moment but it’s spreading.
This comes at a time of economic depression and global uncertainty, a time when a far-off and unrepresentative government has no mandate from the people and a time when hard-up and apprehensive people are getting angry.
The situation reminds me of the situation in another European country not so long ago. Rival factions of ideologically-aligned groups fought pitched battles in the streets against a background of global instability and hyper-inflation. The battles grew in intensity as the people got angrier and more scared, and mob mentality took over. The memberships of those groups grew and grew as people sought safety in numbers. Eventually, those battles played out, and the boss of the biggest gang won an election promising and end to the violence and offering people certainties and stability. They didn’t get it of course, they merely traded disorganised street battles and chaos for a police state at home and organised military battles abroad, followed by chaos and destruction at home when the tide turned.

As Leg-Iron recently remarked, people at the moment are getting angry. They don’t know quite who with, yet, but they are ripe for someone to tell them who. Those mobs in that not-so-far-off time and place got their scapegoats, they were given their enemies, and off they went. The place is like a tinder-box just waiting for a spark. In the most recent electoral opinion poll, a party with dodgy, far-left racist views got a bigger slice of the pie than before, after a massive advertising campaign from the BBC and the government. Then the ‘anti-’ groups started causing trouble, then ‘anti-anti-’ (i.e. not officially aligned) groups like the EDL start to pop up, all the while getting airtime on the television. The lines are being very publicly drawn, and sooner or later people are going to feel compelled to pick a side, whether they agree or not. They’ve already announced -with very little fuss- that the endarkenment is indeed coming and once the lights start going out people are going to get more angry and more scared. Angry and scared people are capable of many things that they may not normally do.

So who wins? The guys at the top, the people who want control. Whether civil unrest leads to the current collection of stooges invoking the civil contingencies act, whether it leads to a (carefully chosen) strongman taking power, or even -unable to govern ourselves- direct rule from the EU or UN: freedom and choice will be things of the past.

Interesting Times are on the way.

Conjecture On Iran

Apologies for my light blogging of late, to be honest, nothing has really grabbed me. The new speaker is no surprise, we all knew that there would be another corrupt bastard elected, we just didn’t know which one. There’s been a few elven-safety and political correctness stories (roads-n-burkhas) but I just couldn’t get the ire going, so I’ve dusted off a draft I started a couple of weeks ago regarding the on-going situation in Iran:

Everybody seems to have an opinion on Iran, some think Ahmadinijad really did win, others are sure it’s a fix. As Ross said (and his commenters agreed) the Ayatollahs choose a list of candidates and then let the election proceed as normal, so there doesn’t seem to be much need to rig an election.

However, there has been in recent times, a history of allegedly stolen elections leading to unrest, sit-ins, and eventually complete changes of government, and those newly-installed governments tend to be more pliant to the wishes of the west: the so-called colour revolutions of eastern europe, particularly the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. There is definitely unrest in Iran now. Iran has a very young population which does not necessarily concur any longer with the ideals of the Islamic Revolution (in fact I watched a documentary this morning the morning I started writing this post on the huge explosion in demand for rhinoplasty among the young there). The time has never been riper for regime change. We already know that the west, especially the US/UK, bled white in Iraq and Afghanistan do not have the stomach (or the means) for a prolonged conflict anywhere else. A colour revolution could be just the ticket.

We also know that western powers (or their pseudo-proxies) have been interfering in Iran for some time. Terrorists there affiliated with western intelligence services have been committing various outrages in the runup to the election. We also know, as Penny pointed out, that the protests in Iran are getting disproportionate coverage for their size, compared to protests in Georgia, for example.

Speaking of Georgia, remember when the protests there that led to Saakashvili coming to power were on the nightly news? 100,000 people on the streets protesting a rigged election, the ‘Rose Revolution’ showing the world that peaceful people power could achieve results. Except it turned out that Saakashvili didn’t turn out to be the hero we were told he was. Ethnic cleansing attempts in South Ossetia aside, he’s now got 50,000 people out on the streets against him and there was an attempted mutiny last month at an army base there. Not that you’d know it from the TV news.

There is a similar story in Ukraine. The Orange Revolution was a part of the news for days, again amid allegations of vote-rigging. We in The West were told to cheer when Viktor Yushchenko was finally installed in government, yet since he has fired his government, dissolved parliament, his approval ratings are minute and he is involved in constitutional wranglings to delay an election.

Which brings me back to Iran. We are being shown deaths on Tehran’s streets, and urged to believe that Mousavi won the election (he may have done). But Mousavi is no hero. He’s just as much an establishment figure as Ahmedinijad, merely of a different faction. So would a Mousavi presidency make a lot of difference? Unless he’s taken the Queen’s Shilling, no. The power still resides with the clerics, but destabilisation of such a prominent nation in the region (especially one that’s nuclear-bound) is bound to be advantageous to someone.

Makes you think, doesn’t it…

The Briar Patch

The Tar Baby just sat in the middle of the road looking as cute as a button and saying nothing at all. Brer Fox rolled over and over under the bushes, fit to bust because he didn’t dare laugh out loud. “I’ll learn ya!” Brer Rabbit yelled. He took a swing at the cute little Tar Baby and his paw got stuck in the tar. “Lemme go or I’ll hit you again,” shouted Brer Rabbit. The Tar Baby, she said nothing. “Fine! Be that way,” said Brer Rabbit, swinging at the Tar Baby with his free paw. Now both his paws were stuck in the tar, and Brer Fox danced with glee behind the bushes. “I’m gonna kick the stuffin’ out of you,” Brer Rabbit said and pounced on the Tar Baby with both feet. They sank deep into the Tar Baby. Brer Rabbit was so furious he head-butted the cute little creature until he was completely covered with tar and unable to move. Brer Fox leapt out of the bushes and strolled over to Brer Rabbit. “Well, well, what have we here?” he asked, grinning an evil grin. Brer Rabbit gulped. He was stuck fast. He did some fast thinking while Brer Fox rolled about on the road, laughing himself sick over Brer Rabbit’s dilemma.

Well, the BNP have garnered a larger-than-usual share of the vote, and sent two MEPs to Brussels. They’ve gained an increased profile, an increased legitimacy, and a voice in the European talking-shop, where they can meet lots of many like-minded people. The commentariat -both mainstream and alternative- don’t seem too sure how to take it. They blame the Labour Party, the BBC, both or neither. Some blame the voters. Most seem sure that it was a protest vote. Some don’t.

“I’ve got you this time, Brer Rabbit,” said Brer Fox, jumping up and shaking off the dust. “You’ve sassed me for the very last time. Now I wonder what I should do with you?” Brer Rabbit’s eyes got very large. “Oh please Brer Fox, whatever you do, please don’t throw me into the briar patch.”

“Maybe I should roast you over a fire and eat you,” mused Brer Fox. “No, that’s too much trouble. Maybe I’ll hang you instead.”

The people of these islands, the indiginous white population still being a majority, are fed up with the Westminster Consensus. They want their lords and masters out of the corridors of power. Some want to hang them, others want to imprison them and still others don’t much care (or can’t make up their minds), just so long as they go. Most of them are not racists, or homophobes or anything of the sort. They are just fed up. They are fed up with being treated as second class citizens in their own country. They are fed up with racial quotas, they are fed up with political correctness and they are fed up with any culture being viewed as legitimate except their own.

“Roast me! Hang me! Do whatever you please,” said Brer Rabbit. “Only please, Brer Fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch.”

“If I’m going to hang you, I’ll need some string,” said Brer Fox. “And I don’t have any string handy. But the stream’s not far away, so maybe I’ll drown you instead.”

The BNP are an extreme far-left party. They believe in lots of lovely lefty things, like worker’s control of factories, restriction of the free movement of people and labour, regulation of markets and -like other notable extreme far-left parties of the past- they believe in the primacy of their indiginous population. They have successfully attracted a portion of the demographic that would previously have voted Labour, the white working class. The Labour party (and their chief media outlet the BBC), fearing this, spent the whole of the two weeks before the election denouncing them and their potential voters as racists, and announcing to anybody that would listen that the absolute, worst thing that could happen was the BNP winning votes and getting seats in the European Parliament. Surprise surprise, lots of people that wanted to hurt the Labour Party voted BNP. Who’d have thought?

“Drown me! Roast me! Hang me! Do whatever you please,” said Brer Rabbit. “Only please, Brer Fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch.”

“The briar patch, eh?” said Brer Fox. “What a wonderful idea! You’ll be torn into little pieces!”

The Labour Party is a far-left party. Although they have taken to wearing the clothes of the middle-ground when campaigning, they policies they have enacted, the big state, the targets, the regulation smack  of the Soviet Union. They are collectivist at heart, and their goals are power and control of people. There are many other parties that stand against Westminster and the Securi-State that it has been building for the last generation, lots of small parties that most people haven’t heard of, and they are not extreme far left parties. None of them really got much free publicity, especially not from Labour and the BBC.

Grabbing up the tar-covered rabbit, Brer Fox swung him around and around and then flung him head over heels into the briar patch. Brer Rabbit let out such a scream as he fell that all of Brer Fox’s fur stood straight up. Brer Rabbit fell into the briar bushes with a crash and a mighty thump. Then there was silence. Brer Fox cocked one ear toward the briar patch, listening for whimpers of pain. But he heard nothing. Brer Fox cocked the other ear toward the briar patch, listening for Brer Rabbit’s death rattle. He heard nothing. Then Brer Fox heard someone calling his name. He turned around and looked up the hill. Brer Rabbit was sitting on a log combing the tar out of his fur with a wood chip and looking smug.

So what next? The BNP are a much bigger party now. They’ve won places in a parliament, they don’t look like so much of a wasted vote. That factor alone may increase their vote in the General Election. The Lib-Lab Con is discredited utterly, and although Cameron is probably going to win at the next election, he may well not win the one after that. The Bread is starting to dry up, and nothing the Tories are likely to do will sort that out (and no amount of Circuses will keep the public happy if there’s no Bread).  Where will the vote go then? Certainly it might start going UKIP’s way, and a fairly large portion may well go to the BNP. Seats at Westminster? Don’t rule it out. Especially if they are serious about bringing in PR.

“I was bred and born in the briar patch, Brer Fox,” he called. “Born and bred in the briar patch.” And Brer Rabbit skipped away as merry as a cricket while Brer Fox ground his teeth in rage and went home.

The Cybersecurity Czar and You

It’s happening in a foreign land, and it hasn’t really made the news over here, but Obama’s creation of the post of Cybersecurity Czar affects internet users the world over. As we can see from this diagram, a majority of the world’s internet traffic travels through the United States, as that is where it was first built and expanded from. Many of the things we use every day like Hotmail, Google, lots of blogging sites are all based in the USA so the reality is most of what we do outside the US has already been subject to FISA and will no less be subject to the Cybersecurity Czar and the Cybersecurity Bill, should it pass. For a UK Libertarian blogger, that may not seem so scary, until you remember firstly the US Government‘s view of bloggers and libertarians, and secondly that UK subjects can be extradited to the US on presentation of no evidence whatsoever. Considering the lastest moves in the USA against free speech, does that not make you a little worried?

Apart from the report from the Electronic Frontiers Foundation that the Act’s new requirements will actually make life easier for anyone wanting to commit a cyber-attack on the USA (and therefore, by extension anyone else) perhaps the scariest provision is giving the White House the power to shut down the internet completely, or at least the US portion of it. Since such a large proportion of internet traffic travels through the US, this would effectively cripple what has become the backbone of the world’s financial and business systems. Many companies use the internet not only to generate custom, but also to organise their inventories, place orders, control their logistics and communicate with their customers and suppliers. The company I work for, small fish globally compared to the likes of Wal-Mart and Tesco but nevertheless a huge business sustaining millions of jobs worldwide would be crippled in the event of an internet shutdown. Pretty much all the big players worldwide would be in just such a jam, Y2K eat your heart out, and all of it in the hands of one man. Still, he’s the mesiah, right? The White House’s cure in this instance could definitely be worse than the disease, in fact provoking just this sort of response from a panicked Washington may well be the goal of “Cyber-Terrorists” were they, in fact, to exist. The Endarkenment in an afternoon!

One last thought: Perhaps these proposals will lend weight to the EU’s demands that the US let go the reigns of the internet and hand control to a new, globally-appointed and unaccountable body?

Pushing It (Updated)

Apparantly, the two programmes I recorded on Sunday night were part of a whole series of programming pushing the 2012 meme. The first programme, Decoding The Past, centred on building straw men about various ancient prophecies, and attempting to link them all into 2012. In the end, only the Mayan Calendar and a Delphic Oracle actually named the date, or in the case of Delphi the decade. The others, a clutching-at-straw-man I Ching extrapolation (which, I believe, ended its calculations because of the Mayan Calendar), some prophesies of Merlin, the Book of Revelation etc. etc. did not actually mention any dates for their predictions of doom, despite the programme-makers continually flashing “2012″ up on the screen. They contained predictions that sounded eerily like our times, especially the ‘talking moving pictures’ of the Merlin books but, as anyone who has read Revelation knows, readers at any time in history can find things that sound familiar. Briefly mentioned was the Galactic Alignment, when the Earth, the Sun and the centre of the galaxy line up (or appear to, logically this happens twice a year) an event that happens every 26,000 years, but predictably , and the phenomenon of polar shift where the Earth’s poles swap over. Not ones to induce panic, the programme-makers suggested that when this happens, the entire crust could spin around with the poles with disasterous results. This doesn’t sound terribly likely, but I’m no geologist.

The second programme centred mainly on Nostradamus, or more accurately, on a “new” book (“He’s written a new book?! That was clever,” as my mother remarked) or newly-discovered (there you go, Mum) book (a picture book and not a quatrain in sight- odd) that apparently predicts all sorts of catstrophies around the aforementioned astronomical alignment. I fell asleep during the middle of this one, but not before I had seen references to all the supposed predictions featured in the first documentary, but this time viewed through the lens of the famous prediction-meister.

I suppose it has been a while since the pre-millenial fears of 1999, but I’m still not sure why the 2012 meme is being pushed so much. After all, we’ve got global warming/climate change to worry about now, as well as Goldstein/Bin Laden and now North Korea so the credulous are already worried and fearful about plenty. Perhaps this is dog-whistle doom-mongering, to catch the mystics and new-agers some of whom may not have been caught up in those traps. It’s not really worked on me though, if anything I am now less worried than I was before I saw them, some of the logical leaps and blatant subliminal messaging (flashing up the 2012 logo between obviously not-2012-based predictions) were so obvious that it was easy to see where I was being led. Normal service for the History Channel.

Tragedy Into Opportunity

The news that Olivia Crowther travelled to San Francisco to commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge is tragic, there is no doubt about that (although from the Mail’s story there seem to be doubts that it was, in fact, a suicide), but rather predictably it has led to more calls for internet regulation (censorship) as she had been looking at suicide websites before she left. While I cannot understand people frequenting these sorts of websites (I’ve just had a look at a couple, like this and I really hope this one is a piss-take, if not they are some very scary people) I absolutely believe in their right to do so. Those websites I just linked to popped up while I was searching for the news story in the first place, and I also discovered that the Golden Gate Bridge is the world’s ‘suicide capital’ with over 1300 deaths since it was built.
But I digress. A tragedy of this sort is easy fodder for those who wish to regulate and censor the internet. First they call for suicide sites to be banned or regulated or monitored, or whatever. Once that’s accomplished they will turn to something else. Maybe political sites. Maybe Infowars. Maybe the BNP. Maybe blogs like this one. Maybe blogs like YOUR one.
Just as they turn the spotlight from smokers to drinkers to fat people in the offline world. Incrementalism is the name of the game, and the game isn’t fair.